Data Nerds Hack NASA — in a Good Way

A bunch of data nerds from inside and outside NASA will gather this Saturday at a house in Cupertino, California, called the Rainbow Mansion to hack through the agency’s data jungles.

The event isn’t NASA-sponsored. None of the bureaucracy is involved at all. Instead, the event is being coordinated by a small group of people who just love the space program and want to help open up the agency’s troves of information.

“If we can build cool prototypes and demos and proofs-of-concept, other people will see that it’s not that hard,” said event co-host Jessy Cowan-Sharp, a NASA contractor and proprietor of OpenNASA.com. “Maybe then it will be adopted inside NASA.”

But while NASA has made considerable strides, many of these tools are still hard to find and use.

The challenge for Hackathon events dealing with complex data is how to pick a small-enough bite to chew.

“How do you identify a project that’s doable in a day?” Cowan-Sharp asked.

The NASA data event will be kicked off by a quick introduction by Cowan-Sharp and co-host Robbie Schingler on how they get useful stuff done in short periods of time. They run a site dedicated to developing microsoftware, called TinyApps. Their motto: “Never spend more than 4 hours on a first release.”

Unlike a lot of Sunlight events, which focus on making data more publicly accessible, the NASA-focused event will also look at ways of making data flow better within the agency itself.

“We’re a bunch of government contractors and civil servants,” Cowan-Sharp said. “For us, the question is not just how can we take stuff outside of government, but how can we use these data sources to help each other collaborate.”